A total of 31 people have been included in the UK New Year’s Honours List for their contribution to Holocaust Education, among them many Holocaust survivors. The list includes several survivors who arrived to Britain as children thanks to the Kindertransport, a program that saved several thousand Jewish children from Nazi Germany and other Nazi occupied countries. They were named as: Ruth Barnett, Leslie Brent, Maria Beate Green, Ingrid Wuga, Marc Schatzberger, and Susie Barnett.
Association of Jewish Refugees is ‘deeply saddened’ by the passing of Leslie Brent
Professor Emeritus at the University of London came to Britain to escape Nazi Germany and spoke about his experience of Kristallnacht
Those rescued from the Nazis by the Kindertransport and the descendants of their rescuers are opening a new exhibit on the remarkable humanitarian aid mission at the Imperial War Museum next month. The special display titled ‘A Child’s Road to Freedom: The Kindertransport Activists’ will open on 12 January and tell how 10,000 Jewish children came by train to the UK before and after the war
Who were these children, who had traveled so far, alone? These were the first children of Rabbi Schonfeld’s Kindertransport. Their parents were back home, in Vienna, Austria. They had once enjoyed beautiful homes and shuls and a special Jewish community, but now, Nazi soldiers marched through Vienna’s streets. Despite the Nazi danger, Rabbi Schonfeld had traveled to Vienna to help rescue Jewish children.
Michele Gold, whose mother escaped the Holocaust, honors the 81st anniversary of the Kindertransport. She discusses “Memories That Won’t Go Away: A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransport” and participates in a panel discussion with Kindertransport survivors and descendants of survivors at 3 p.m. Sunday (Dec. 8) at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, 100 The Grove Drive, Los Angeles. Admission is free.
Peter Gossels was a few weeks shy of turning 9 when his mother placed him and his 5-year-old brother on a train to flee Germany for France on July 3, 1939. For two years she wrote letters to her sons as they hid in France from the Nazis and after they traveled to Massachusetts, where families in Brookline provided new homes. She had hoped to follow but, along with most of the boys’ relatives, she was killed in the Holocaust.
Just months before the earth-shattering tragedy of Kristallnacht occurred in Germany in November 1938, awakening the Jewish community to a new reality, the family of Heinz Birnbrei already knew their lives were endangered. The 14-year-old from Dortmund who was later to be known as Henry Birnbrey was given 24 hours to say goodbye to his parents and obtain his visa from the U.S. Consulate in Stuttgart. The future Atlantan sailed on the SS Hansa from Hamburg and arrived in New York in April 1938.
The son of a couple who helped 200 Jewish refugee children escape to North Wales during World War Two has made an emotional return to the place he was born. Professor Daniel Sperber, who lives in Jerusalem, was born at Gwrych Castle in 1940. His parents, Rabbi Shmuel Sperber and Miriam, had arranged the ‘kindertransport’ of dozens of children fleeing persecution in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Relics of this haunted but rarely examined chapter of the Holocaust are now on display in “Kindertransport — Rescuing Children on the Brink of War,” a collaboration of the Yeshiva University Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute. The exhibit opened in New York in November 2018 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the start of Kindertransport, the operation that rescued 10,000 refugee children from Nazi-occupied Europe in the years leading up to the Holocaust.
Marion in New York, photo by Stella Schumacher
Die in Berlin geborene Marion emigrierte 1939 zunächst mit einem Kindertransport nach London und lebt heute in New York City
Kibbutz Lavi, whose founders included children evacuated from Germany to the United Kingdom as part of the Kindertransport program before the Holocaust, has become the main provider worldwide of furniture for synagogues.
In an unassuming suburb of Berlin lies a testament to a truly remarkable tale. A temporary exhibition entitled Am Endes des Tunnels (‘At the End of the Tunnels’) commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransports from Berlin. Between 1938 and 1940, up to 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied territories were transported to Great Britain. Of these, it is estimated that some 7,500 of those rescued were Jewish.
The Garnethill Synagogue in Scotland is home of the Holocaust Archive Center. That Center turned out to be the perfect venue for Andrew Marcus of North Brunswick to search for the Kindertransport records of his mother, Erica. A visit to the center in the spring of 2019 resulted in Marcus being prompted to contact the World Jewish Relief organization(WJR). After writing to the WJR, Marcus received the archived records shortly after Erica celebrated her 95th birthday at her home in New Jersey.
On the eve of World War II many parents faced an impossible choice: stay with their children as the Nazis closed in, or send them away. More than 10,000 children made it to England and other countries as part of the kindertransports or children’s transport, a life-saving program. Today there’s a new kind of kindertransport needed, one that focuses on reuniting separated children and their parents.
“I want to tell you something before I forget,” Dr Ruth Westheimer says at the beginning of our conversation. “Make sure you tell the Jewish Chronicle that every time I come to London, I go to Liverpool Street station and look at the Kindertransport sculpture.”
It is, I think, no melodramatic overstatement to describe the artist Eve Hesse’s life as essentially tragic. As a toddler, she barely survived World War II, having been sent from her Hamburg home to Holland on the Kindertransport with her older sister Helen. Later, she watched her mother destroy herself after learning that her own parents had perished in the camps. And, in 1970, at the age of 34, she died of a brain tumor, just as she was beginning to get recognition for her sculptures.
KTA Board member Rachel Rubin Green is featured in the Los Angeles Times for her work with refugees “Family separation and refugee cap reinvigorate Jews’ activist roots: ‘We’ve always been immigrants’ “
In the footsteps of childhood: In July, former children’s transport children, some with their partners and descendants of those who had once been rescued, made a special journey. The New York-based “Kindertransport Association” organized a commemorative journey, which led from Vienna by train and boat via Berlin and Amsterdam to London.
Frank Meisler’s The Arrival. Amy Williams
is in danger of forgetting its lessons Reports in the UK press on September 1 revealed plans by the home secretary to end the current migration system which reunites refugee children with their families living in Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit. If legal routes to family reunion close, thousands of children will be at risk. After surviving dangerous journeys, these children, who have already suffered greatly, will be extremely vulnerable to traffickers and exploitation.
The story of the Kindertransport has been well told. But less well known is the story of the 4,000 men – mainly Austrian and German Jews – who were brought to Kent before the outbreak of war in 1939. Now, relatives have traced their footsteps to Sandwich near the site of the refugee camp that became their haven from persecution. Tony Green has the story.